


Dreaming of the Dead (as though death itself could be undone)

by snowshus



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Blood and Gore, Dreams, Family, Friendship, Gen, M/M, Murder, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-25
Updated: 2019-10-25
Packaged: 2021-01-02 20:36:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 2,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21167507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/snowshus/pseuds/snowshus
Summary: Mal was many things to many people.





	1. Yusuf

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ictus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ictus/gifts).

Yusuf has only ever heard of Mal, she didn’t show her face on the first level - just a train barreling down the street. He knows the story of course, most people in the dream share business know about how Cobb killed his wife. That he was innocent (while mostly innocent) Eames explain after the fact. Not many people now that part. Eames doesn’t talk about where he learned it. Says only that he used to run with some of Cobb’s associates. Yusuf isn’t the most up-to-date man in the world, but even he has gathered that Cobb only has the one associate. Arthur’s name in dreamshare's more illegal activities was well established before Cobb joined the scene. Technically Yusuf had worked with Arthur before, though they had never met. Yusuf rarely meets the team. The Boss buys his compounds and comes back if they need more. The less he knows the better usually. 

The novelty of teamwork had made the Inception gambit alluring even if he’d doubted it’s viability. It'd been a very long time since he’d gone into the field. He'd almost forgotten how much he enjoyed it. The beauty of dreams is beyond anything reality could hope to conjure.

When Mal comes to him in dreams, afterwards, she never looks quite right, sort of like someone mixed a bunch of puzzles pieces together, and even though they all fit together perfectly the picture was all wrong. Instead of puzzle pieces Mal is pieced together from stories that are mostly tragedy and horror. Her skin always as white as death, her lips as red as blood, and the rest of her in constant flux - pieced together from all the haunted faces he sees addicted to the dream. 

She’s invaded his mind, a ghost that doesn’t belong to him. She is in turns helpful and harmful, as likely to kill him as to save him. 

“You have incepted me,” he jokes at her once as they wait for the rest of his new team to return from the second level.

“Hardly, you know where I came from after all.”

She flips dark red hair over her shoulder.

“Yet, I cannot stop thinking about you.”

“And what do you think of me?"

"I think perhaps you were right to lose the totem. Does reality really matter that much, when this is the alternative?"

"Why don't you come down and join me? We can find out together."

"Maybe next time." 


	2. Eames

Eames has only met Mal, the real Mal, the one who was made of flesh and blood, once, early in his relationship with Arthur. It was when they were still building. They were at that stage of a relationship when the possibilities open up like flowers and they could still believe they won’t whither on the vine. The part before they started destroying all the things they’d built. 

She had been fascinating. She was the sort of person a man could study for years and still not forge right. He’d get all the little ticks, the sway of her steps, the brushing of hair when she was unsure, the eyebrow tick of annoyance but still never quite capture her essence. Arthur was like that too, or he had seemed so in the beginning. They were alike in so many ways. In the way they looked and in that ineffable essence. It was like they were deep oceans full of secrets and if you were very lucky and paid very close attention they might whisper one to you.

In Eames builds a fairy tale castle in his dream. He’s always been a hopeless romantic and there isn’t anyone here to judge anyways. No one but his own mind. He built it for Arthur, to judge to his heart’s content. But he never got around to sharing it. When he's first designed this dream the castle was tall and white and impractical, like the one they'd seen at Disneyland when they’d gone with Mal and her children. The one time Eames had met Arthur’s family. Now the castle is grey and crumbly. It's Annabelle Lee’s castle by the sea, a monument to something dead. 

Arthur, in Eames' dream, lies in the tower. Sometimes he is made of stone and sometimes of mist, but he is always untouchable. Eames' Sleeping Beauty, but no kiss will wake him. He’s not real. The real Arthur is busy teaching Ariadne how to dream. He is very much alive and his skin, the few time Eames' has brushed against it, is warm and soft. This unmoving Arthur is just a projection, just a memory and a wish. 

Mal comes, summoned from the depth of his memories of Arthur, as the friendly and outgoing version of the man he’d fallen in love with. He did not know her well enough for her to come as herself.

“I was dumb to come here. I don’t know what I was hoping for,” he tells her as they lay on either side of Arthur.

“You wanted lots of things,” she offers, “You wanted to see him unhappy, you wanted to get him back, you wanted him to beg your forgiveness, you wanted to tell him you you’re sorry. Am I missing any?”

“Well, I’m not getting any of that.” Eames sighs. Projection Arthur is mist today and Eames' hand passes right through when he shifts closer.

“Oh, I don’t know. He looks pretty unhappy, don’t you think?” Mal says, propping her head up so she can see over Arthur's cloud.

Eames shrugs and it swirls the colors of Arthur's blue button down. “You know how he is, no emotion ever slips through that mask. He could be overjoyed and no one could tell.”

“You know better than that. We both do, remember?”

As though Eames could forget the the way Arthur had started smiling at him after a while, soft and open. Or the trip to Los Angeles when Mal had stood next to Eames watching Arthur holding her new baby and leaned over to rest her shoulder on Eames. 

“He seems happier lately,” she'd said with one of those secret smiles. Eames had thrilled at the implication that it was because of him.

Eames had built this castle for that Arthur. Arthur would have laughed when he saw it. He would have said “Really, Eames? You’re ridiculous,” in that way of his that meant he loved it.

That Arthur disappeared with Mal. The only Arthur left is the shadow that follows Dom from one end of the Earth to next. His ocean of secrets turned into a desert and all of their possibilities withered in the heat. Eames could Forge Arthur easily now, he is grief and anger and regret wound into a little ball and held in the tension between his shoulder blades. This Arthur is always waiting for things to go wrong, never trusting anyone else to carry their weight - let alone a bit of his. This Arthur can't build. He only destroys, and he destroyed them. 

“I wanted to show him our castle.” Eames admits to her.


	3. Saito

The picture of Mal on the street, barely more than a bloody smear was included in the dossier he'd compiled on Cobb. She was pushed out of the window, according the police report. Saito doesn’t really care. He needs the best dreamers, the most adventurous, the most daring. That’s Cobb and this information will be useful in forcing his hand. He didn’t expect to meet her. He knows it’s a dream as soon as he sees her, perfect and whole. He doesn’t understand the implications of that at the time. She is helpful, he thought he’d summoned her, that she was part of the tapestry of his own mind. That had been a foolish miscalculation, and it had cost him later.

She does not appear to him as she had in the first dream. That was Cobb's version of her. When Saito’s mind summons Mal it summons that picture. Her body twisted and bloody. She smears red across his white shirt when she touches him. “Are you sure you woke up?”

Limbo had seemed very real. It’s hard to remember now. It was a dream and like all dreams, even the lucid ones of dreamshare, once you wake up they start to evaporate. He’d aged in Limbo. He’d lived his life exactly the same as if he’d been awake. It had not seemed strange. Perhaps the world he thinks of as real is the illusion. Perhaps he truly is that old man, merely dreaming his youth again.

Perhaps he reached the end of old age while he was in limbo and was reborn as a young man to live it out again and again and again until he takes the step and let’s himself die for real. He can understand the urge to jump off the highest tower, just to know that when you hit the ground, awake or dead, the doubting at least would be over. 

“Are you sure you woke up?” Mal asks and blood drips down what's left of her chin.

He is not.


	4. Ariadne

Mal is a shadow of a shadow. An image of guilt and violence hollowed from the person she must have once been. Arthur had said she was lovely, he's voice almost uncharacteristically soft. But Ariadne only knows this shade, this ghost who is but a caricature of a real person. She comes to Ariadne in nightmares, a beautiful warning about the high price of dreaming to big. 

The rain beats against the cliffs of Dover, violent as the woman standing beside her. 

“What were you really like?” Ariadne asks before she dies.

“What do you think?” Mal says and pushes her into the ocean.

“I think you were smart,” Ariadne says when she sees her in the dark alley, gun glinting under the street light.

“I think you were passionate,” she says before the knife plunges into her heart.

“I think you were kind,” she says as Mal’s hands wrapped around her neck.

“I think you probably lovely,” she says to grave when she finds it.


	5. Arthur

Mal in Arthur’s memory is taller than she was in real life. The subconscious is like that. He remembers her towering over him, a very grown thirteen year old to his small-for-his-age seven years. He always looked up to her. In the dream she is taller than all the other projections. That’s how he can tell Dom’s Mal from his own. Dom’s Mal is petite but always very bright, she fills their dreams with color, that at least they agree on.

Talking to her is a pointless exercise. He knows psychologists have been experimenting with the idea -Projection Therapy. Pay thousands of dollars to talk to yourself. That's all it is. You’re not fixing your relationship with your mother or husband, your just talking to yourself. Any crazy person can do that without shelling out any money. 

Sometimes that’s all you have though.

“What is it, Arthur?” Mal asks. When he finds her where she always is, sunning on the beach he created. He modeled it after the one in South France that Grandmere had taken them to as children. 

“I think Eames might have stopped hating me.”

“We wanted that, didn’t we?”

She says, patting the sand next to her towel.

“Maybe,” Arthur says taking off his jacket and sitting down on the sand. “It was easier when he was still mad.”

“But lonely.”

She points out.

“I’m used to lonely.”

“But you never liked it.” 

Arthur ducks his head, “No use lying to myself, I suppose.”

“You should talk to him, you should apologize.”

She says laying a gentle hand on his arm.

“I’m not sorry for choosing Dom, choosing you.”

“Of course not, but you didn’t have to be such a condescending ass about it.”

“I’m always a condescending ass, he knew that.”

Arthur knows he sounds petulant, but were else can you act like a petulant child but in your own mind.

“No you’re not, and even if you were, that’s no excuse.”

“If the real you were here, you’d have something more helpful to say, you’re a terrible projection.”

“I’m everything you remember.”

“And you’re not even close,” Arthur sighs dropping his head onto her shoulder. “I miss you so much.”

“I know,” Mal runs her hand soothing through his hair.

“I miss him.”

“I know,”She repeats. 

“Do you think she’d be disappointed in me, in how I handled everything, if she were alive?”

“I don’t know.”

“Of course if she were alive there’d be nothing to handle,” Arthur adds bitterly.

“You think you’d have messed it up anyways though,” Mal points out.

“You’re not supposed to know that.”

“Like you said, you can’t hide from yourself.”

She shrugs with the open shoulder.

“What should I do?” He asks.

“Apologize, talk to him.”

“What if he doesn’t love me anymore? What if he does? Which do reckon would be worse?”

“Which do you want?”

“I want him back,” he admits to the ocean.


	6. Mal

_You’re waiting for a train, a train that will take you far away. You know where you hope his train will take you, but you can’t know for sure. Yet it doesn’t matter. Why doesn’t it matter?_

The darkness only answers with silence. Mal tries again.

_You’re waiting for a train, a train that will take you far away. You know where you hope his train will take you, but you can’t know for sure. Yet it doesn’t matter. Why doesn’t it matter?_

There is only silence and darkness. Mal isn’t even sure she’s really speaking, but there is nothing else to do but echo this one phrase over and over into the endless sea of black. As though this is all that still exists of her, a riddle with a stupid answer.

_You’re waiting for a train, a train that will take you far away. You know where you hope his train will take you, but you can’t know for sure. Yet it doesn’t matter. Why doesn’t it matter?_

“Because we’ll be together.” A young woman with light brown hair and clothes that hang too large on her shoulders says. In the unending dark she seems to be made of pure light. She holds out her hand. “Are you ready to wake up?”


End file.
